I have been a scientist in the field of the earth and environmental sciences for 33 years, specializing in geologic disposal of nuclear waste, energy-related research, planetary surface processes, subsurface transport and environmental clean-up of heavy metals. I am a Trustee of the Herbert M. Parker Foundation and consult on strategic planning for the DOE, EPA/State environmental agencies, and industry including companies that own nuclear, hydro, wind farms, large solar arrays, coal and gas plants. I also consult for EPA/State environmental agencies and industry on clean-up of heavy metals from soil and water. For over 20 years I have been a member of Sierra Club, Greenpeace, the NRDC, the Environmental Defense Fund and many others, as well as professional societies including the America Nuclear Society, the American Chemical Society and the American Association of Petroleum Geologists.

Like We've Been Saying -- Radiation Is Not A Big Deal

The United Nations Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation has finally admitted that we can't use the LNT hypothesis to predict cancer from low doses of radiation. Now the Japanese people can start eating their own food again and stop being as afraid. Source: United Nations

A very big report came out last month with very little fanfare. It concluded what we in nuclear science have been saying for decades – radiation doses less than about 10 rem (0.1 Sv) are no big deal. The linear no-threshold dose hypothesis (LNT) does not apply to doses less than 10 rem (0.1 Sv), which is the region encompassing background levels around the world, and is the region of most importance to nuclear energy, most medical procedures and most areas affected by accidents like Fukushima.

The United Nations Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation (UNSCEAR) (UNSCEAR 2012) submitted the report that, among other things, states that uncertainties at low doses are such that UNSCEAR “does not recommend multiplying low doses by large numbers of individuals to estimate numbers of radiation-induced health effects within a population exposed to incremental doses at levels equivalent to or below natural background levels.” (UNDOC/V1255385)

You know, like everyone’s been doing since Chernobyl. Like everyone’s still doing with Fukushima.

Finally, the world may come to its senses and not waste time on the things that aren’t hurting us and spend time on the things that are. And on the people that are in real need. Like the infrastructure and economic destruction wrought by the tsunami, like cleaning up the actual hot spots around Fukushima, like caring for the tens of thousands of Japanese living in fear of radiation levels so low that the fear itself is the only thing that is hurting them, like seriously preparing to restart their nuclear fleet and listening to the IAEA and the U.S. when we suggest improvements.

The advice on radiation in this report will clarify what can, and cannot, be said about low dose radiation health effects on individuals and large populations. Background doses going from 250 mrem (2.5 mSv) to 350 mrem (3.5 mSv) will not raise cancer rates or have any discernable effects on public health. Likewise, background doses going from 250 mrem (2.5 mSv) to 100 mrem (1 mSv) will not decrease cancer rates or effect any other public health issue.

Note – although most discussions are for acute doses (all at once) the same amount as a chronic dose (metered out over a longer time period like a year) is even less effecting. So 10 rem (0.1 Sv) per year, either as acute or chronic, has no observable effect, while 10 rem per month might.

UNSCEAR also found no observable health effects from last year’s nuclear accident in Fukushima. No effects.

The Japanese people can start eating their own food again, and moving back into areas only lightly contaminated with radiation levels that are similar to background in many areas of the world like Colorado and Brazil.

The huge waste of money that is passing for clean-up now by just moving around dirt and leaves (NYTimes) can be focused on clean-up of real contamination near Fukushima using modern technologies. The economic and psychological harm wrought by the wrong-headed adoption of linear no-threshold dose effects for doses less than 0.1 Sv (10 rem) has been extremely harmful to the already stressed population of Japan, and to continue it would be criminal.

To recap LNT, the Linear No-Threshold Dose hypothesis is a supposition that all radiation is deadly and there is no dose below which harmful effects will not occur. Double the dose, double the cancers. First put forward after WWII by Hermann Muller, and adopted by the world body, including UNSCEAR, its primary use was as a Cold War bargaining chip to force cessation of nuclear weapons testing. The fear of radiation that took over the worldview was a side-effect (Did Muller Lie?).

Background Radiation Differences on Annual Cancer Mortality Rates/100,000 for each U.S. State over a 17-Year Period. There is no correlation with radiation dose. States with significantly higher doses, greater than 2.7 mSv/year (270 mrem/year) like Colorado, have lower cancer rates than States with much lower average doses like Georgia, and vice versa. (from Frigerio and Stowe, 1976 with recent radon data)

Of course, doubling the dose doesn’t double the cancers below 10 rem/yr (0.1 Sv/yr). It has no effect at all. The millions of nuclear workers that have been monitored closely for 50 years have no higher cancer mortality than the general population but have had several to ten times the average dose. People living in New Mexico and Wyoming have twice the annual dose as those in Los Angeles, but have lower cancer rates. These cannot occur if LNT were true, because LNT states this could not occur.

There are no observable effects in any population group around the planet that suggest LNT is true below 10 rem/yr (0.1 Sv/yr) even in areas of the Middle East, Brazil and France where natural background doses exceed 10 rem/yr (0.1 Sv/yr).

Although rarely discussed, LNT does not take into account the organisms immune system, biological recovery time between doses or other relevant mechanisms that operate at low doses on an actual organism versus cells in a petri dish.

UNSCEAR is an independent body of international experts that has met regularly since 1955 and helped establish radiation as the best understood, though weakest, carcinogenic agent in the world through its studies of atomic bomb survivors, the effects of the Chernobyl accident, industrial radiological accidents, and medical radiation treatment.

Many of us have been at them for years to stop procrastinating and prevaricating on something so important that the inaction itself is harmful. This report is a welcome change. The report, approved by the United Nations General Assembly, will now serve to guide all countries of the world in setting their own national radiation safety policies.

This is incredibly important to Japan where national guideline changes have been horribly over-reactive in response to Fukushima, especially for food, using LNT in a way it should not be used.

Accepted global limits on radioactivity levels in foods is 1000 Bq/kg (1,200 Bq/kg in the U.S.). Dominated by cesium-137 and Sr-90, these levels were set by organizations like the IAEA and UNSCEAR after decades of study. Because of public radiation fears broadcast in the press after the Fukushima accident, Japan cut the limit in half hoping it would have a calming influence. But the level of fear remained high, so Tokyo lowered the limits to one-tenth of the international standards.

This was supposed to induce calm? Telling the public that radiation is even more deadly than they thought? That their food is toxic? Were they nuts?

This has had the unintended consequence of making people even more afraid of what they are eating, moving safe foods into the scary category and limiting food exports, causing even further economic and social damage.

Suddenly, all sorts of normally safe foods are now banned. Wild mushrooms from Aomori Prefecture are now banned because they have cesium levels of about 120 Bq/kg. This cesium has nothing to do with Fukushima, it’s the same type as is in everyone’s food around the world, and it wouldn’t have rated a second look before the accident (Japan’s Contamination Limits Way Too Low).

The Japanese people should not be punished for nothing. But these new results and the UNSCEAR reports demonstrate that they are being punished. There was no reason to lower the rad limits on food, especially after the short-lived nuclides have long decayed away. One of the incorrect assumptions was that people in Japan would be eating only contaminated food, which is quite wrong. The international limits were set for very good reasons, lowering them makes no sense except to further hurt farmers and consumers in Japan.

UNSCEAR’s chair Wolfgang Weiss stated that no radiation health effects had been observed in Japan among the public, workers or children in the area of the damaged nuclear power plants, in keeping with studies already published by the World Health Organization and Tokyo University. Doses of radiation received by people near the damaged power plant were so low that no discernible health effect could be expected.

The Japanese government, for all its failures, did the right thing in evacuating Fukushima Prefecture quickly and by preventing contaminated food and water from being consumed. This was in stark contrast to Chernobyl where the Soviets intentionally kept the public in the dark.

Ingestion of the short-lived isotope iodine-131, with its well-known risk of thyroid cancer when absorbed in the thyroid glands of children and young people, was the only major radiation-related health effect of the Chernobyl accident on the public. And the Soviets could have prevented that by acting quickly and openly. Of course, the Soviets didn’t much care about the public.

This will not happen in Japan. Iodine-131, with a half-life of only 8 days, decayed away in a few months following the accident and no one was found to have ingested any significant amount.

According to the reports, six Fukushima workers received total doses of over 0.25 Sv (25 rem) during their time fighting the emergency, while 170 workers received doses between 0.1 and 0.25 Sv (10 to 25 rem). None have shown ill effects and most likely never will. Radiation played no role in the coincidental deaths of six Fukushima workers in the time since the accident, who died from accidents, e.g., being crushed by debris or being swept out to sea.

Yes, there are health effects of radiation above 0.1 Sv (10 rem) that statistically increase up to 1 Sv (100 rem) but even in this higher range it’s hard to see them without a big enough population. The only radiation events on this scale, where large populations received 0.1 Sv (10 rem) to 1 Sv (100 rem) have been the atomic bomb blasts from World War II.

The effects of radiation only start to become clear at high acute absorbed doses of over 1 Sv (100 rem), and even then it is necessary to eliminate other potential causes before radiation can be unequivocally said to be the cause, advised UNSCEAR.

What this means for nuclear waste disposal is even more dramatic, but more on that later!

In the end, if we don’t reorient ourselves on what is true about radiation and not on the fear, we will fail the citizens of Japan, Belarus and the Ukraine, and we will continue to spend time and money on the wrong things. I’m sure the anti-nuke ideologues and conspiracy theorists will not accept these U.N. reports, but then…they don’t like the United Nations anyway.

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The USNRC staff routinely performs an ongoing evaluation and review of independent studies like the Tooth Fairy Project published by the Radiation Public Health Project. The NRC found that the Tooth Fairy Project had little or no credibility:

“There are principles of good science that are recognized by the scientific community such as whether a study can be replicated; whether it has considered all data or was it selective (e.g., in the population or in the years studied); whether a study evaluated all possible explanations for the observations; was the data used evaluated for validity and reliability; and whether the study’s conclusions were subjected to independent peer review, evaluation and confirmation.

There are a number of questions about the Health Project studies with regard to methodology, assumptions, and conclusions. Generally, these studies have not followed good scientific principles. Frequently, they have

•not established control populations for study; •not examined the impacts of other risk factors; •used very small sample sizes to draw general conclusions; •not performed environmental sampling and analysis; •selectively chosen to ignore data in certain geographic locations or during certain periods of time because they did not “fit”; •not subjected their data to the independent peer review of the scientific community as a whole; and •used an incorrect half-life for Sr-90 which gives a false impression that strontium levels in the environment are decaying more rapidly than in baby teeth.

The Radiation Public Health Project (RPHP) has conducted a number of studies claiming radioactive strontium-90 (Sr-90) in the environment is responsible for increases in cancers.

One of the RPHP’s studies, sometimes referred to as the “Tooth Fairy Project,” reported that Sr-90 concentrations in baby teeth are higher in areas around nuclear power plants than in other areas.

Numerous peer-reviewed scientific studies do not support the RPHP’s claims. NRC finds there is little or no credibility in the RHP’s studies.

Approximately 99% of Sr-90 in the environment came from atmospheric testing of nuclear weapons. The second largest source of Sr-90 in the environment was the Chernobyl accident.

The amount of Sr-90 from all commercial nuclear power plants is a tiny fraction of the amount from Chernobyl.

The estimated radiation dose from all sources of Sr-90 in the environment is approximately 0.3% of the dose that the average person in the United States receives from natural background radiation. These dose levels are well below the levels that are known to cause any health effects.”

It is funny how threatened the NRC gets by a $40,000 tooth survey by Dr. Mangano. The NRC pulls out all their contacts with universities and old research to try and slam him. His excess death statistics for Fukushima scare them also. Where are the infant mortality statistics for Japan for the past 20 months? Suppressed.

Where is the NRC tooth study? They write: “numerous peer-reviewed, scientific studies do not substantiate such claims.”

Am I missing something? Did they use real baby teeth to counter the Mangano study?

Can’t come up with one? Not surprising.

Let’s look at each study the NRC quotes:

“Cancer in Populations Living near Nuclear Facilities” 1990

WS: The NRC admits this 1990 NCI study is old and needs updating:

“Nonetheless, some communities have expressed concern about the potential impact of these releases on the health of citizens living near nuclear facilities.

To help address these concerns, the NRC has asked the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) to perform a state-of-the-art study on cancer risk for populations living near NRC-licensed nuclear facilities. Through this NRC-sponsored study, NAS will use its expertise to update the 1990 report..”

WS: Next one…the infamous University of Pittsburgh 2000 study. The late Bernard Cohen (aka Mr. Hormesis) helped cobble together this mishmash of distortions. Critics of this research were not kind:

“The University of Pittsburgh’s most recent “health study,” released on Halloween, is essentially a recitation of discredited protocol and disputed data. Re-released on October 31, 2002, the Study actually acknowledged an increase in lymphatic and blood cancers among men. However, as in previous University of Pittsburgh Studies conducted by the same group of researchers (Evelynn Talbott et al; 2000),1 this survey relied on government and nuclear industry sponsored “health studies” which were completed in the early 1980s. These studies were based on inaccurate dose projections, did not factor data only available in 1985 regarding the severity and conditions of the partial-core meltdown at Three Mile Island Unit-2,2 and did not factor the prevailing weather conditions and wind patterns in March-April, 1979.”

WS: At first glance the statistics seem to validate low cancer rates because of the long tenure of the Connecticut Tumor Registry.

But not so fast…The Johns Hopkins University School of Hygiene and Public Health reports on the problems of self-reporting in the Connecticut Tumor Registry: “The rate of false-negative reporting varied widely by cancer site, ranging from 0 percent for melanoma skin cancer to 83.3 percent for cancers of the central nervous system (table 5).”

http://aje.oxfordjournals.org/content/153/3/299.full.pdf

Next one: American Cancer Society (ACS), 2001c.

WS: First…the NRC link to their footnote does not work. The search feature at the AVS also does not find the NRC substantiating paragraph they attribute to the ACS. But I did find this in a Google search:

“In 1998, ACS allocated $330,000, under 0.1% of its $678 million revenues, to research on Environmental Carcinogenesis, while claiming allocations of $2.6 million, 0.4% of its revenues.

http://www.preventcancer.com/losing/acs/rejects_regulation.htm

WS: Doesn’t seem like much money to spend on national research for cancer attributed to environmental carcinogens.

The next one: 2001 Florida Bureau of Environmental Epidemiology

WS: Unfortunately that document also is missing in action. Maybe Rick Scott knows where it is hiding.

WS: Gee…all the links in Google are dead to those terms. You wouldn’t think Entergy would let that validation information go fallow now would you?

Unfortunately after more research at the Illinois Cancer Registry I see the top scientists already have their mind made up on whether nuclear emissions could cause cancers in the community:

“There is no study the Department can do that will show what caused cancer among residents in a community. No one study is likely to prove that a particular exposure definitely causes a particular disease. No single study nor even a large number of epidemiological studies will enable a person to know why he or she developed cancer.”

http://www.idph.state.il.us/about/epi/cancer_clusters.htm

WS: You know what? You just can’t make that up. *;-)

My conclusions:

The crappy old NRC good old boys pre-2001 research hardly qualifies as a debunking for Dr. Mangano.

Additionally…if strontium-90 is so low from Fukushima why did one of the few research efforts find a lot of it in Yokohama last year?

Excerpt: “Here’s the image of the test report by Isotope Research Institute in Yokohama City:

Strontium-90: 195 becquerels/kg Cesium-134: 29,775 becquerels/kg Cesium-137: 33,659 becquerels/kg Total cesium: 63,434 becquerels/kg The ratio of strontium-90 to cesium-137 in this case is about 0.58%. In comparison, the same ratio from the samples taken in Fukushima Prefecture was between slightly less than 0.1% to 8.2%”

WS: Yokohama is 157 miles from Fukushima NPP as the crow flies. Finding strontium-90 that far away indicates things are not going well in central Japan.

There are three very large radioactive coriums in the ground at Fukushima Daiichi pumping out cesium, plutonium, strontium, and a thousand other radioisotopes for the next millennia.

Will: The bottom line that debunks your whole argument is from the National Cancer Institute (NCI), the principal agency responsible for cancer research in the US. The National Cancer Institute states that NO EXCESS MORTALITY RISK CAN BE FOUND IN COUNTIES WITH NUCLEAR FACILITIES:

“A National Cancer Institute (NCI) survey published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, March 20, 1991, showed no general increased risk of death from cancer for people living in 107 U.S. counties containing or closely adjacent to 62 nuclear facilities. The facilities in the survey had all begun operation before 1982. Included were 52 commercial nuclear power plants, nine Department of Energy research and weapons plants, and one commercial fuel reprocessing plant. The survey examined deaths from 16 types of cancer, including leukemia. In the counties with nuclear facilities, cancer death rates before and after the startup of the facilities were compared with cancer rates in 292 similar counties without nuclear facilities (control counties).

The NCI survey showed that, in comparison with the control counties, some of the study counties had higher rates of certain cancers and some had lower rates, either before or after the facilities came into service. None of the differences that were observed could be linked with the presence of nuclear facilities. “From the data at hand, there was no convincing evidence of any increased risk of death from any of the cancers we surveyed due to living near nuclear facilities,” said John Boice, Sc.D., who was chief of NCI’s Radiation Epidemiology Branch at the time of the survey.”

James Conca writes: “Suddenly, all sorts of normally safe foods are now banned. Wild mushrooms from Aomori Prefecture are now banned because they have cesium levels of about 120 Bq/kg. This cesium has nothing to do with Fukushima, it’s the same type as is in everyone’s food around the world.”

WS: The assumption that the cesium-137 found in Aomori mushrooms (235 miles from Fukushima NPP) are from Chernobyl in 1986 is a big stretch of scientific guessing by one Japanese scientist named Yasuyuki Muramatsu.

Muramatsu writes: “”The fact that no cesium-134 has been detected proves that the contamination happened prior to the Fukushima nuclear accident,’’ Muramatsu, 62, said. “It is from nuclear weapons tests conducted by the Soviet Union and China from the late 1940s to the late 1960s, and from the Chernobyl accident in 1986.”

http://ajw.asahi.com/article/0311disaster/fukushima/AJ201301060010

WS: BY the way James, even if Muramatsu is correct (which I seriously doubt) the mushrooms in Aomori ARE toxic with radiation and sales prohibited by the Japanese government. Certainly not “safe” food as you wrote.

But back to the claims of the Japanese government-sponsored scientist. Cesium-134 does not always have to be found with Cesium-137 in equivalent levels. Especially after nearly two years since Fukushima Daiichi blew up because the radioactive half-life of C-134 is 2 years versus 30 years for C-137.

Also the Japanese government has been caught in lie after lie with their research since April 11, 2011. They manipulated radiation monitoring posts by decontaminating the soil around the posts and failed to provide wind plume data when it was sorely needed for residents to evacuate.

The SPEEDI data the bureaucrats in Tokyo refused to reveal to Japanese citizens in the early days of the Fukushima nuclear explosions was an act of that many residents considered as criminal, akin to negligent homicide:

Excerpt: “In interviews and public statements, some current and former government officials have admitted that Japanese authorities engaged in a pattern of withholding damaging information and denying facts of the nuclear disaster — in order, some of them said, to limit the size of costly and disruptive evacuations in land-scarce Japan and to avoid public questioning of the politically powerful nuclear industry.”

Yes, this is the issue. These mushrooms, as for most food in Japan, were unaffected by Fukushima, and are not toxic, have never been toxic, wouldn’t be anywhere else in the world. The new levels are arbitrarily impacting their use. Yes, I certainly don’t trust the government/corporate collusion in Japan, that’s what got them into trouble in the first place.

Some people accept the non-peer reviewed reports from a group with close ties to the nuclear industry. And some of us accept the overwhelming scientific evidence and consensus:

“Even the very lowest levels of radiation are harmful to life, scientists have concluded in the Cambridge Philosophical Society’s journal Biological Reviews. Reporting the results of a wide-ranging analysis of 46 peer-reviewed studies published over the past 40 years.” http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/11/121113134224.htm

(WHO / UNSCEAR is so corrupted by the nuke lobby that the lead author for their Chernobyl report actually works for the IAEA, whose purpose is to promote nukes.)